Comment 10 for bug 32597

I am also experiencing failures while booting at "Loading hardware drivers", which I understand to be udev-related. I had this problem with Flight 4, I had it with Flight 5, and I still have it after dist-upgrading from Flight 5, a few hours ago.

Specifically, "Loading hardware drivers" blocks the boot process for 2-3 minutes every time I boot, without fail. But that is where the consistent behavior ends.

Sometimes "Loading hardware drivers" reports failure, sometimes it reports success. When it fails, and sometimes when it succeeds - at any rate, the most common scnario - is that the boot continues until EVMS tries to start, and there the boot halts for good. The kernel is not locked, as the Caps/Num lights operate, and I can Alt+SysReq to unmount my disks and reboot, but I cannot Ctrl+C to halt the EVMS init script; it just sits there forever (I've let it sit for five minutes).

The other, more rare scenario is that "Loading hardware drivers" and EVMS both report success, but when I log in to GDM I am presented with a single terminal, which scrolls a repeating error message about permissions on /dev/null, presumably an infinite loop somwhere in a bash profile/rc file. I can Ctrl+C to break the loop and get a usable shell. The problem, obviously, is that /dev/null has 0640 permissions. Issuing /etc/init.d/udev restart fixes the problem. After doing so, I can re-login to GDM and get the GNOME desktop. This is the only scenario which results in a usable system. (Incidentally, this happens on both of my Breezy boxes everytime I boot, and has happened since before Breezy was released. It also happened a few months back when I ran Debian unstable. Infinitely frustrating.)

I have booted with init=/bin/bash as described earlier in this thread, and here are my findings. No queue directory exists in /dev/.udev before or after starting udevd, but it does appear after running udevplug. The last line printed by udevplug is /sys/devices/pci0000:00.

I have no udev log to offer, as everytime "Loading hardware drivers" fails, EVMS blocks the boot indefinitely, and I presume that the loggers are not running when I boot with init=/bin/bash. I have posted ouput from dmesg and lspci, along with the contents of my /dev/.udev directory after running udevplug, at the following url:

http://pasture.ath.cx/~nick/udev/

My kernel never locks, so I don't know if I should be reporting under a bug issued to the kernel team. Please advise.

And please help! Just tell me what you need from me. I really don't want to miss out on Dapper.